Friday, August 31, 2012

Version 5!

Protection Warrior AoE damage seems a bit ridiculous at the moment due to the lack of a vengeance cap. Glyph of Revenge is pretty OP and may get nerfed. Still getting a feel for how to use Shield Block, so for the moment I'm just hitting it whenever it lights up. Or if there's a bunch of magic damage flying around maintaining uptime on Barrier instead. This will all be easier to understand once I can set up Power Auras to easily visualise it all on the fly.

A fellow Protection Warrior whispered me last night to mention an unintended effect of the lack of a vengeance cap-- that Baleroc mechanic where he increases the tank's health over the course of the fight while buffing his own damage in proportion. While tanking Baleroc this Protection Warrior ended up with 273k attack power, doing an average of something like 350k DPS for the fight, including an Execute crit for 1.5 million damage. In one hit.

Apparently Warlocks are all about multi-dotting now. I feel lucky that in all my years of WoW I've managed to avoid ever playing a spec which did AoE damage by casting the same spell over and over on multiple enemies [perfect example of "assembly-line" gameplay], but it would appear those days are over. Destro gets a conceded pass for having a multi-dot CD which is pretty fucking awesome.

I get a bit miffed when I go to EJ for some theorycrafting advice and their Warlock thread does not even mention playing the game, but is just a series of graphs showing which combination of specs, talents and glyphs provides 3% more theoretical damage overall. I guess as long as they're having fun...

Demonology's going to take some getting used to. I don't understand why Metamorphosis has you spamming just one spell. I think they must have gotten a bit too much feedback from Warlocks who miss the glory days of Burning Crusade. I also miss how front-loaded this spec used to be. Now you have to spend ages building up to your heavy damage phase.

For the moment I'm concentrating on the much more manageable Destruction spec. Single target is strong, assuming the boss lives long enough for you to max your Embers [again, very long ramp-up time]. There is no AoE filler so we end up AoEing with a primary target like a melee class, with AoE spells also providing significantly faster Ember generation so you can chuck out more Chaos Bolts in between, with the ex-bane spell Havok giving you the ability to "cleave" a few spells to another target. I get the feeling that once this all becomes second nature it will be a very fun spec to play.

I've yet to figure out whether Demonic Sacrifice is the best choice for damage. Having a second demon as a damage CD is attractive, but considering how powerful Chaos Bolt is it's hard to pass up anything will buff it directly.

Also, OH MY GOD SO MANY DEFENSIVE CDS. I heard someone say somewhere that it's easy to justify because Warlocks necessarily need to damage themselves as part of their DPS rotation, but haven't healers been coping fine with this for years? Do most DPS have huge defensive CDs by now?

Holy Paladins are pretty much the same as they were. I think I'll be better at it once I can set up a buff indicator for Sacred Shield and that for that proc that lets you cast a free WoG/LoD.

Flash of Light seems a bit less inefficient than it was previously, but I still barely see the use for it. I always thought these "quick, expensive" heals were kind of pointless. My understanding of the design is that they are for emergencies, ie when someone is in danger of dying. But 1.3 seconds is still a very long cast time if someone is in immediate danger. Especially considering your next fastest, not to mention far more effective heal is a 2.1 second cast-- so casting a Flash heal seems to be useful only in the specific situation where you expect a player to die between 1.3 and 2.1 seconds from the start of your cast.

For Paladins especially, now that we're able to always have Holy Power banked I find it hard to imagine a situation where a 1 or 2-point Word of Glory wouldn't do the trick over a Flash of Light. Or barring any future need for it, you could even just hit Lay on Hands. Or if the player in danger isn't terrible you can just have faith in them to hit one of their own CDs to stay alive long enough for you to cast a Greater heal as per normal.